Welsh author and mystic Arthur Machen is probably best known
for his short story, The Great God Pan. This eerie narrative
of abysmal medical experimentation and occult visitations
has the scribe relating a series of unnerving happenings
taking place at the peripheries of mainstream Victorian
society. It becomes apparent that dark forces are scheming,
tampering with the lives of mortal men. It’s a typical
Machen scenario and a subject taken up by writer Rob Young
in the short story that accompanies this, the fourth
full-length, from Belbury Poly aka Jim Jupp. The
Journeyman’s Tale recounts a standard visit to a village
watering hole that ends with the chief protagonist wallowing
in the froth of Bacchanalian debauch. Here lies the strange
quasi-mystical inter-zone where the veil partitioning the
mystical from the everyday is lifted, with Jupp’s music
providing a temporary gateway transporting us from one to
the other.

For the first time Jupp has enlisted the help of other
musicians: the addition of Jim Musgrave (drums) and
Christopher Budd (bass and electric guitar) enabling
arrangements - an amalgam of electronica, progressive rock
and ethnological sounds - more complex than those previously
featured on 2009’s astrologically-obsessed From an Ancient
Star. These elements are employed during the odd enchantment
of Cantalus, a miasma of spooked synth and black mass sighs
which comes on like the Tomorrow’s World theme penetrated by
an ancient Egyptian hex. This Eastern interference is also
prevalent during Goat Foot where the heat-sodden rhythms of
the souk are visited upon the rural idyll of the Suffolk
coast. More Anglo-centric is Green Grass Grows, where a
child’s voice delivers a pagan rhyme with a mixture of
menace and wonder over the circuits of a misfiring ZX
Spectrum. Imagine a combination of The Incredible String
Band and Boards of Canada and you won’t be far off.
Elsewhere, Chapel Perilous wigs out on a cosmic Can-like
groove, launching cascades of backwards guitar chicanery and
tumbling horror tones.

Like the majority of Ghost Box releases, The Belbury Tales
is infused with a deep vein of paranoia, a palpable fear, an
attempt to reconcile the imminent unknown (evoking a
reimagined or never experienced past). But whereas previous
albums have alluded to the grim spectre of the Cold War,
this time around the spooks appear to be a little closer to
home.